There are no wealthy actors, musicians, authors, or anyone in the tech industry? Huh, guess I'll go buy me farm.

Are you really this dumb, or do you just want an argument? I've had this argument before, and it was dumb that time, too. The short, short form is "where do you think the electricity to run the internets comes from? Magic fairies?"

The distros are using systemd because it makes writing startup scripts easier. They take up fewer lines. That's about it. It has nothing to do with DevOps." -

you mean configuration files, not startup scripts.

No, no he does not, and there is no obvious reason how you might come to that conclusion except deep ignorance. The configuration files for the programs differ little when systemd is involved. The startup scripts are intended to go away, and be replaced by unit files, which are indeed easier to write than init scripts as they are simply a collection of variables. They are organized into sections segregated by square brackets like a windows ini file, but AFAICT the names of the variables are all globally unique anyway (corrections welcome) so you could reasonably just stuff a unit file into a script that would suck it into the environment and then do stuff based on the unit file to implement a really dumb shell script that would be more difficult to customize than what we have now — init scripts which can implement as much functionality as desired.

I was suggesting the internet would have been ablaze with structured factual comments from these "devops", letters to Redhat etc. a bit like the Devuan guys who put their money where their mouth was and are making their own way without systemd.

DevOps doesn't mean much, I share your skepticism of overuse of the term. It's from Agile, and may or may not have useful meaning outside of Agile-land... which itself may or may not have useful meaning.

On the other hand, I keep hearing that systems administrators who use cloud services and are thus "administering" umpty-hojillions of "machines" enjoy systemd because reasons, but I never see a citation for that, either.

It should be a large movement capable of stopping systemd developing if they actually existed

You can't stop systemd from developing, especially since it had corporate backing. And for people who don't follow every distribution's MLs, systemd sort of snuck up on us. We didn't imagine that debian would convert to systemd, for fuck's sake. Statistically nobody even imagined that until it was happening. Who would have ever thought that the one time Debian moved quickly on something, it would be something contentious?

it also solves the problem with fossilized development of subsystems like init and logging,

Not a problem, and also not actually a thing. Several competing init systems which didn't bring baggage with them already existed, but Lennart is a real NIH kind of guy so he didn't start with one of those. Stable init and log daemons are features, not bugs.

systemd, as init and process manager, actually takes on the coordination responsibility that lacked previously. It is way cool how "namespace" isolation and kernel Capabilities(7) are integrated

You do realize that cgroups is a thing you diddle with very small commandline programs, right? And by making directories? These are things which could be done in init scripts. Most distributions use standard init script libraries where such initialization can take place. It didn't require a whole new daemon; at most, some minor changes to again one of the existing competing init daemons would have been a fine place to start. Not tying it to a specific log daemon is the really important part, though! A whole new init system would be a whole lot less odious without a whole new log daemon with serious design deficiencies — especially breaking the human-readability component of the Unix Way that made Linux (as an imitation of Unix) successful to begin with.

y dismissing every systemd feature and everything systemd does as "bad"

No, what is being dismissed as bad is the NIH attitude, the proven lack of maturity (in all senses) of the primary developer and maintainer and his code, and the dismissing of what is tried, tested, and therefore true as old, outdated, and obsolete.

Key features like dependency management, whether a service terminated with an error condition, and what to do when a service terminates are things that you CAN NOT DO if all you have is an init script.

Of course you can. You know the PID of the init script, and you know PPIDs. What prevents you from doing that? Even a shell script could do it.

The driver involved in the recent uber rape incident in India had earlier been booked for rape and uber had no clue about this.

The problem is doing something about it. If you search for information on this stuff you could easily get the impression that Uber is the root of all rape in India, but that's a lot of complete horseshit. The truth is that some states still have incomplete and/or half-assed records on taxi drivers, and no Indian state really gave a shit about criminal background checks until the international community began to shine a light on rape in India after a young woman was raped to death on a moving bus, and the locals finally reacted.

The truth is that most of the world is inordinately kind to rapists, this is only really changing now, and Uber is no more or less complicit than the rest of India. There's literally no framework in place which would make it possible for them to do background checks on drivers in India. The ones used for the licensed taxis are bullshit, when they even exist.

The perpetrators of this vandalism probably were bored, undereducated, underachieving young WHITE male(s)

You have any facts to back that up or is this just speculation?

Blacks are more commonly convicted when tried, and there are still more whites than blacks in philly, so it's probably still more likely. Also, consider that whites may have felt more likely to get away with such a crime.

The money supply is finite, otherwise it would have to be infinite, which it clearly isn't.

The money supply is effectively infinite; long before you run out of ability to print it, the system crashes and it becomes worthless. The supply of wealth is finite, because all wealth is derived from the land.

You can't steal what is given away, and the law says that if you leave stuff lying around on purpose, that you're in a grey area. Specifically, by leaving it on the side of the road without any sort of permit, you're littering. Not only are you giving up your rights to whatever you left there, but you can be fined for discarding of waste improperly.

Now, I agree that it's douchey to damage the thing and take part of it, but I don't agree that it's vandalism or theft. Some social experiments fail. Or, alternately, it's a success in another way; it's taught us something about the world.

It doesn't do that, because all the data is interpreted by humans as text, and has to be presented to them as such. It also has to be understood as text, so if the journal processing tools do any of the things that systemd proponents claim they do, they will need a "bloated" text parsing engine.

It does seem a bit much, but the systemd transition is a slow one. Many packages are still using init.d startup scripts, which means we can't take advantage of systemd's features with them.

You should be able to take advantage of all of systemd's features whether the daemon is designed to be run from an init script or not, and even whether it is run from an init script or not. If not, there is either something deeply wrong with you (incompetence) or deeply wrong with systemd (poor design.)

Note that the problem with taking things out when shooting straight up is that human's are really pretty crappy at judging distance directly overhead. Which makes judging the lead you give the target pretty much guesswork...

That's why you don't lead the target. Instead, you sweep the barrel. Get the bead moving with the target and pull the trigger. Then you don't have to guess. Humans are pretty crappy at gauging distance in general. We use tricks to compensate.

Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart.

The spread of writing hastened the downfall of the Roman Republic, he argues, facilitating the emergence of a Roman Empire stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. To administer such a vast empire, the Romans were forced to establish centralized bureaucracies. These bureaucracies depended on supplies of cheap papyrus from the Nile Delta for the long-distance transmission of written rules, orders and procedures. The bureaucratic Roman state backed by the influence of writing, in turn, fostered absolutism, the form of government in which power is vested in a single ruler. Innis adds that Roman bureaucracy destroyed the balance between oral and written law giving rise to fixed, written decrees. The torture of Roman citizens and the imposition of capital punishment for relatively minor crimes became common as living law "was replaced by the dead letter."